Last Friday I ran an effusive post on the fabulous articles now appearing in the New Republic! Well, that still stands, although I’d like to expand a little on what Paul Starobin wrote about the demise of Bill Daley and walk back, just a little, about what I said about the “good Kagan,” whose first…
Search Results for: Tea Party
What does the future hold? More of the same
When I was a little boy, I liked to take baths. And when I was taking a bath, I liked to rock back and forth, causing the water to swish back and forth, my ultimate goal being to cause the water to swish back and forth so violently that at one point all of the…
Super Committee, last seen discarding genitals
When you’re a Super Committee, you can do whatever you damn please, right? Anything! And anything includes nothing, right? The null set! Which is just what the super committee set up by Congress a few months in a fit of “this time we mean business” fury seems ready to do. Over at Politico, which takes…
What went wrong? Possible causes
Well, now that all the fuss over Confidence Men, Ron Suskind’s “did not/did too” exposé of the furious infighting for influence among President Obama’s economic policy advisors has died down, we can review the matter without having to decide whether Larry Summers is a complete asshole 24/7 or if he occasionally has some downtime. So…
Rick Perry, ahead of his time
Poor Rick Perry! When he busted into American consciousness as a bona-fide candidate for the Republican nomination, he had a killer rap: “I’m Rick Perry, bitch! I hang more men before breakfast than y’all do all day!” Rick’s no apologies, what you see is what you get image, of which he is obviously very proud,…
Steven Brill, not entirely brilliant
I’ve been reading Steven Brill’s Class Warfare, his free-swinging account of the latest chapter in America’s ever-continuing education wars. Filling us in on the historical background, Steve tells us how Albert Shanker’s American Federation of Teachers pumped up starting teachers’ salaries in the Big Apple from $5,300 in 1962 to $45,530 in 2007, “more than…
Why Do the Heathen Rage, Part XLVIII
One of the many projects that I have—lumbering towards completion like weary mammoths journeying across the darkened Arctic landscape of my mind—is a political novel set in the near present-day, with the lives of its characters coming to a halt shortly before the 2008 election. To pick up a little background, I’ve been reading, among…
The sound of one balloon bursting
If this is Wednesday it must be time for another attempt by Bill Kristol and his merry men to pretend that Paul Ryan is going to run for president. Paul Ryan isn’t going to run for president. Why does Bill Kristol want to pretend that he is? Because Paul Ryan is the author of a…
Hard-headed CEOs demand that Obama show leadership and solve their problems for them
Just when you feel totally exasperated by President Obama’s mealy-mouthed, don’t hit me reasonable man meme, along come a passel of two-fisted, tough-talking CEOs to make the President look good. Over at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove and McKay Coppins corral a bunch of business big-wigs to get the low-down on the mess in Washington,…
Ragin’ heathens, north and south
Michael Lind has a nice piece over at Salon, pointing out that the Tea Party nation has a distinctly southern tinge. Yet it was the Tea Party in Massachusetts—Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to replace massively flawed liberal icon Teddy Kennedy—not the Tea Party in Texas, that has the Obama Administration dazed and confused….